It’s a chilling prospect,but the AI we’ve created could transform human nature, argues this spellbinding modern book by the author of SapiensAt the heart of this spellbinding book is a simple but chilling view: human nature will be transformed in the 21st century because intelligence is uncoupling from consciousness. We are not going to build machines any time soon that have feelings like we have feelings: that’s consciousness. Robots won’t be falling in love with each other (which doesn’t mean we are incapable of falling in love with robots). But we have already built machines – vast data-processing networks – that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves: that’s intelligence. Google – the search engine, and not the company – doesn’t have beliefs and desires of its own. It doesn’t care what we search for and it won’t feel hurt by our behaviour. But it can process our behaviour to know what we want before we know it ourselves. That fact has the potential to change what it means to be human.
Yuval Noah Harari’s previous book,the global bestseller Sapiens, laid out the final 75000 years of human history to remind us that there is nothing special or fundamental about who we are. We are an accident. Homo sapiens is just one possible way of being human, and an evolutionary contingency like every other creature on the planet. That book ended with the thought thatthe narrative of homo sapiens could be coming to an end. We are at the height of our power but we may also have reached its limit. Homo Deus makes honorable on this thought to clarify how our unparalleled ability to control the world around us is turning us into something modern.
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Source: theguardian.com